June 2011 - Still trying to figure out the problem

Here are some highlights from a doctor's visit last June, before we fully understood what was going on with my back problems.

1.  My 7 yr old son, let's call him Bubby, had to be left in charge of his 3 yr old sisters in a mostly secluded Lab waiting area while I had X-rays taken.  He did a fantastic job of keeping them happy and all 3 of them behaved.  I was very proud.

2.  One of my daughters (nicknamed Bandit for her toy-thieving), while the twins accompanied me to the restroom because I felt they were too young to leave in the main, really public waiting area alone, said:  "Nice bottom, Mom."  I said, "Thank you, Bandit" because what else could I say? It was all I could do to keep a straight face.

3.  Our older twin is usually the socialite that makes all the introductions, but one minute younger and slightly smaller Little Bit likes to get hers in now and then too, and both of them like to talk about their family members as "friends" which I think they feel is more grown-up.  On this day Little Bit introduced me to the other family that joined us in the Lab waiting area shortly before we finished up there:  "And this is my Mom that is a [Mrs C]-friend!"  She remembered her daddy's name, too.

4.  To my relief, my X-rays did not reveal any glaringly obvious disc compressions or vertebral fusions.  Obviously they will still have to be read by a specialist, but that was some comfort to both the on-call doctor and me.  Of great concern to us both was the extra line of bone-like material running almost the entire length of my spine on my left side.  No one who looked at it had any idea what it was, and everyone is greatly interested in what the ortho surgeon will think of it when I see him on Thursday.  The on-call doctor's only guess was that it was a calcified artery, although my excellent history of good blood pressure and reasonable cholesterol didn't immediately support that theory.  So it remains to be seen what the column of bone-like substance next to my spine is, but it seems very probable to me that it could be related to the tremendous pain and reduced mobility of that area.

Note: It would eventually be concluded, much later on, that the mysterious "extra" bone line was actually the overlapping image of my sternum, superimposed over the image of my spine in the frontal x-ray.  Since no one had tried to count my vertebrae in these x-rays, it was not at all apparent at this time that my third thoracic vertebra, called T3, was completely collapsed, and now occupied no more space than what a normal disc gap would look like on x-ray.